Language Identity

Spanish-speakers who move to this country do not threaten the United States’ English-speaking identity, concludes a study in the September issue of the Population Council journal Population and Development Review.

The authors of the study—Rubén Rumbaut and Frank Bean, sociologists at the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University—found that Mexican-born families in Southern California retained their Spanish language longer than other groups. But when a Spanish-speaking family reaches its third generation in the United States, they found, the Spanish language is no longer spoken.